As a long time follower and admirer of your work, I'm struck by how much nicer and more professional your final products are these days. This is an incredible project and leap in technology
@@puremilkgenius To be fair, mastery takes decades to achieve and a TH-cam series just doesn't have a time for that. No one's going to watch you make clay pots over and over again.
@@puremilkgeniusI’m not a fan of how he doesn’t refine the things he builds, the “saw mill” is a great example of what looks like cobbled together pieces of wood doing a crappy job lol
As an electrical engineer I’m overjoyed that you’ve gotten to this stage. On the same vein of early communication, with the amount of copper wire you have available it’s well within the realm of you making your first crystal radio receiver and /or crude spark gap transmitter. The future is exciting and I can’t wait to see how this branch of HTME progresses!
for crystal radio they need a diode though which requires chemicals they likely don't have. Also with such crude technology it would be hard to sync the frequencys.
Among the first semiconductors circuits were galena “cat’s whisker” diodes that just used a very thin piece of wire to find and use a crystalline rectification junction to demodulate an AM radio signal. This was first done in the late 19th century. I agree, an AM radio receiver would be rad. Although… if we are talking about building a wireless telegraph as a next step you don’t need a semiconductor. Marconi just used a “spark gap” and an antenna as the transmitter and early receivers (like magnetic detectors) weren’t that much more sophisticated
@@A_youtube_channel_ just like the reply above,a detector diode can be made very easily with crystals found in nature already from Galena to Iron/Copper pyrites. The hardest part is getting enough wire for a coil and potentially making an earpiece from scratch- that would be the hardest given to crystal radios you’d need a high impedance load sensitive enough for the weak signal.
@@陳冠維-f7i I’m sure that for educational purposes and limited power this won’t be an issue as much as people making their own transmitters for science fairs etc… we’re not talking kilowatts of power or extended periods of transmission. For the purposes of a video it should be fine. I’m no legal expert but for all intents and purposes a primitive transmitter one can assume would be built would surely put out less interference than some switch mode power supplies or whatnot.
As a Ham radio operator, I can say that Morse Code (CW for Carrier Wave) is alive and well. It's a great deal of fun, and when you become proficient, you can "hear" words. At speed, it's musical, and you can definitely hear the rhythm of another operator and recognize their fist.
that's so fascinating and entertaining!! i love music so much and I've always thought it would be fun to learn morse code. i also think those HAM radios are cool, so maybe i could try those as a good medium to learn morse code on/for!
I’ve been reading about WWII Morse code operators, and how they could recognise the “fist” of a Morse code operator using the radio by the way they pressed the key. Like recognising someone’s handwriting, but they called it an operator’s fist. They even allegedly used concert pianists for “funkenspiel” or radio games, where things would happen like using specially trained concert pianists to replicate an enemy radio operator’s fist to insert counterfeit messages using broken cryptography for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes. Radio Morse code is obviously a different t beast - but people would tap communications lines to introduce a sounder and relay so they could listen to messages, or insert their own. It was an unbelievably wild time to be alive and the real dawn of the nerd.
As I understand it, the US rail lines had the batteries at the receiver end. This way, just a key to ground could send a message. The trains carried a key with them. If something went wrong between stations, with just a key, you could climb a pole and send a message. I believe they used a fairly high voltage. I also think that the system was likely a "positive ground" system. The had some method of heat treating wire to keep it soft as they went smaller and smaller. Wire was often wrapped with thread. Unlike the goo insulation you were using, cotton would hold up under pressure. On the sounder, the clearances were very small to take advantage of the fact that the force created by an electromagnet are greatest just before the armature hits the pole piece.
yeah, they could definitely use an annealing treatment to recover the metal's ductility after every 2 or 3 passes of the wire. that would make it require less energy to deform as well
Further refinement of the receiver/sounder: attach a pencil lead to it and pass a strip of paper moving at constant speed under it, this way you get a printout of the message without someone having to manually write down the dots and lines
If this channel teaches me anything, it's that there is good reason why so many trades have long held traditions. Nothing came easy and each skill took generations to master,
8:55 Were you all remembering to anneal between each draw through the die? That you can maybe add a couple of grooved wheels to keep the copper where it is pulled through the die perfectly perpendicularly or as close to it as you can manage.
@@Fyr365 Well when the material comes through the hole if you don't pull it directly perpendicular, the stress will be focused to one side of the wire and can cause more stress in a smaller space making it easier to snap. If you pull it perpendicular the whole wire takes the force equally around its circumference.
I've seen a few of your episodes and was very impressed. Building a sawmill, making a tee shirt, forging out tools, making a battery, making corn flakes and now making a telegraph. I hope for an up coming, you make the first light bulb. That would be a nice one. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍
Been watching since the sandwich trailer. I'd like to say, after the unfortunate situations that occurred during your time on TH-cam, you have drastically refined your skill. It's almost like not having access to the tools you used to have has increased your skills for the greater good. You have progressed immensely!!
Technically it isn't digital, since there's not any transistor technology involved. It works on analog! But telecommunications from scratch is still amazing!
@@Theinatoriinator This debate has raged for decades in amateur radio spaces. The US FCC, though, doesn't classify CW/Morse code as a digital communications mode, however. The reasoning I've heard goes that it's not operating on on/off signals only, as the duration and spacing of the pulses is also necessary to carry useful information. Something like Baudot code used for 2-FSK is where it becomes more "digital" (it's very similar to modern ASCII)
Historical note: There are TWO Morse codes. One is American Morse ( Which my father learned as a young child , before radio, used by railroads and land telegraphs that used the sounders like they have made here; where the spacing of the "dots & dashes" was critical.), and the one in use today, International Morse which uses tones generated by the transmitters through the air. I have an very old Instructograph Machine with tapes for American Morse.
That you made 20awg is pretty impressive; early telegraph lines were multiple (sometimes up to a dozen) strands of 16ga, to reduce voltage drop, so you may have had more luck with a thicker wire. That's especially important with an earth return system, since half of the path is going to be even worse than the wire. A quarter mile of #20, passing 20V to power, say, a quarter amp coil, loses almost half the power to the wire alone; make half the circuit just a little bit worse and you're running out of voltage pretty quick. Keep in mind that you are running against extreme novice telegraph operators who are writing down dots and dits and decoding them after. Expert morse operators today can get up past 50wpm without writing down anything, though 25wpm is a pretty good cutoff for skilled or not as at that point you can't decode individual letters on-the-fly and instead are recognizing whole words. You'd have to be a pretty fast runner to outrun your five-word (Paris standard word) phrase...
I think these are really good points. When we calculated the resistance of our wire, we figured, in ideal conditions, it had around 14 ohms of resistance for the quarter mile, each direction. It didn't really sound like much, but ohms law is our enemy here.
man oh man a telegraph that can send a message to a cell phone then be converted to text now thats the most unique and creative way ive ever heard of to show off old tech in such way that young people will be interested in for more than a few seconds andy you deserve to recognized for what your doing your a hero young man
Earth return you need to soak the ground at the electrodes with saline solution, quite a lot of it, to get the resistance down, plus leave time for the saline solution to soak deep down. Probably easiest if you use a pipe auger to make the hole, fill with salted ground, and put the electrode in it, though the grass on top will not recover for a long time. Plus you also need a good few electrodes in parallel each end, to get maximum surface contact between the rods and the ground, with the rods no closer than their length apart as well.
dry conditions, too low amps or voltage, poor wiring connections, many many variables. We fight with elc fence regularly that's not two wire systems due to poor earth grounds. +/ - wire systems is the only way to go, until a tree falls on it anyways.
I think the ground-return path is area-based, from what I know, telegraph stations used to bury huge squares of metal to achieve ground return, so maybe that's it
It's also the lack of a relay acting as a weak signal amplifier. Telegraph stations could receive extremely weak signals, measured as voltage potential, and boost them high enough to operate the noise-maker at the other end, but without that you need a ton of voltage to arrive at the end and 20v minus voltage loss over that thin wire just isn't going to cut it.
@@oasntet This is what I thought when they assembled all the wiring, an intermediate relay as an amplifier would have solved the problem of the lack of power in the signal.
Thanks for the upload; it's always good to keep track of our roots. In 1998, a former colleague was retiring from US State Dept Communications; his subordinates disliked him because he had difficulty keeping up with Comms technology as the world was transiting from analog to digital (cellular). For his retirement ceremony, as a "gag" gift, they presented him with a Morse key mounted onto a plaque, thanking him for his service. He got excited, teared-up right away, and exclaimed "this is what we used when I began my career with the government..." He had started out as an Army "ditty-bopper" during the Korean War. Fast forward to just last year (2023), I met a young man discharging from the Navy, I asked his MOS...he was a ditty -bopper. Seriously..? Yep, the Navy had re-introduced Morse Code intercept.
I agree that this was one of the biggest steps of technology. This is as big as bronze age vs stone. There was communication before telgraphs (by hand) and after (by speed of light).
It's so weird that you uploaded this now. I became a radio amateur in 2018 in the UK and learnt morse in 2019. This weekend I picked up the ARRL's technician license book to re-learn and get a license to operate in the US. This is awesome stuff. Thanks for the video
Stunning bringing together of techniques and technologies, asphalt, linseed oil, sounds like Japanning recipie. making an insulated coil put a tear in my eye, that was an achievement still used today. Super impressed by the whole build. You made a machine that can transport truth and lies.
Are you guys going to do a video on how your refined your zinc? You kinda glossed over it last time and I really want to know since that would be the biggest hurdle for me if I was a time traveler.
The Dutch comedian Herman Finkers had a bit about early telecommunications in his skit, two persons see smoke signals one says to the other what does that mean? the second person said I'll read it for you,... help!.. my... rug... is... on... fire!!...
I have a little experience working with grounding grids. The electrical testing done on grounding grids is called the Fall of Potential. For the grounding to be effective over long distances, multiple (4+) metal rods should be driven in 6-8 ft depth around the sending and receiving areas.
You should get the book called “How to rebuild Civilization” also known as “The Book”. It has a ton of information on things very similarly to what you’re doing. It’s got things like ancient battle tactics, herbalism, useful inventions, farming, etc. I think has around 400 pages of information.
This is amazing! I'm floored by how far you've come, and impressed how you've kept high standards consistently all these years. Here's wishing everyone at HTME many more!
I passed by this video in my feed SO MANY TIMES because....honestly idgaf about a history of the telegraph. it took me a while to remember that this is "How To Make Everything" and then was like "holy jesus that's right this is about the FUN parts of things LET'S GOOOO pass the popcorn"
Just for courtesy. Samuel Morse did not invent “Morse” Code as we know it. Morse wanted to use numerical values for words and had an entire book made to transmit specific code. Alfred Veil, Samuel’s business partner, ran with the idea of using the most common alphabet letters as simple dots and dashes along with using special characters. It should be called Veil Code, which in my mind sounds cooler and gives credit where it is due.
this happened a lot back then; a number of inventors were either outright robbed of their ideas, or were convinced to sell the rights to someone who had the missing capital needed to get the idea off the ground.
Morse stole all the credit that he could, but he was mostly just the money guy and not an engineer or someone with technical skills. From what I've heard of him he sounds like a terrible person in a lot of ways, so it would be nice if people stopped giving him credit that he doesn't deserve.
Vail, not Veil, but I agree. It is one of the reasons radio operators today don't bother calling it "morse", it's just "cw" for some complicated technical reasons.
Great video and project. As a new amateur radio operator, I'm slightly disappointed that you didn't reach out and find some local hams who still do morse code over the air (CW) to operate and listen to your telegraph, they could have conveyed and decoded "what hath humanity wrought" a lot faster. Even 10wpm is considered slow by their standards, but would have been a lot faster. Hope to see this once you build a radio! (morse code over the air being the first use of radio) Glad you were still able to string up and power a long enough wire to outrun the runner, wonderful work!
Firstly it is amazing what you do here and the way you keep learning new things. I saw that you didn’t re heat the copper wire between passages in the die. If you will reheat the wire to his recrystallization temperature it will brake less. Also there is graph that can Help you to plan your passages and when exactly you need to re crystallized the copper. If you will write in google “cold work copper” you will find the graph you need. Good luck with your work hope to see more soon 👍
At Pipe Springs National Monument in AZ, there is a telegraph station setup, and some stretches of wire are still there. From what i saw, they used like 6 gauge solid steel wire. Low impedance is your friend.
Indeed! I believe it varies on the material you're working with, but we found with copper wire that annealing after every two to three passes was ideal to keep the copper from getting too brittle.
I think so because they seem to be getting breaks it looks to me like the copper is work hardening after a few pulls. I would at least have it warmed through a fire before being drawn. Also the angle. They pulling the wire up at an angle instead of straight through. 9:42. HTME has always been a great, but Andy has always been messy. It has improved since the early days.
For copper, every 3 pulls is a good rule, as most available plates are meant to be used with the hands or a draw-bench. You can get away with 4 on silver and sterling, and for iron, it really depends on the alloy!
Is there any way to anneal while pulling? Like, continuosly, instead of doing one step after another? And is there a way to pull continuosly? Like, whitout the need to take the entire wire out, to start squishing the rest?
I remember that paper which contained how to make cellular networks... it wasn't easy to make it but it did make that village have their own sim cards and network
Thanks for letting me play with this at open sauce! Getting to meet all of you there was great! It's impressive what you've been able to accomplish and i can't wait to see what you do next!
Make an oscillator from your relay and place it at the senders site. I think to do that you need to add a contact when the relay is open. Connect the normally open contact to the coil. Connect the other end of the contact and coil to the battery with the morse key/switch in between. This way you can create a audible sound. At the receiver you just need to add a simple speaker. I think AC travels far longer with being audible. But you can't amplify the signal with relays. Therefore to repeat the signal you can use a relay, but when the wire resistance is to high it won't work. Or you need to make your relay more sensitive. Make the moving part of the relay smaller and lighter so that the electromagnet has to move less mass. I just wanted to make suggestions how to improve this setup. Nice work.
Congratz on your hardwork! It's awesome to see you get this far and I can't wait to see what will you do in the future. Are you considering building a wireless version, with a spark transmitter? Ofc you wouldn't be able to test how long range it is due to modern laws, but a weaker signal to just test inside a room should be legal.
Your problem was too low of a voltage and too high of a current, the ground has quite high resistance. Modern wire pulling uses geared rollers that very precisely exert force on a small part of the pulled wire and right after they anneal it so it doesn't become brittle on the next pull. That's how we can end up with such thin copper strands. Also adding some resistors in parallel with the both ends of the cable would terminate some of the undesired self induction of the transmission wire and sounder coil which will increase signal quality and speed up coil reaction time due to decreased electrical ringing in the system. By the way what this system did could probably be detected by radio receivers miles away because of all the sparking and inductive load with a big antenna you had. You should bring in a ham radio operator with a frequency analyser to check out what kind of a signal that contraption generated.
I am surprised that a hand cranked rolling mill was not used to form the wire. Graduated grooves in the iron rollers would compress the copper down to 18gauge then to a drawplate for finer wire. The rolling mill was common in the early 19th century at least.
railway telegraphs with the clicking variant of the code is very fascinating to me as a ham radio morse code operator. thanks for sharing this. I especially appreciate spark gap technologies of the 1910s era of communications. Maybe you could one day make the best video on one of those as well. 73
Earth return needs a lot of contact area to the earth and it works a lot better when everything is really wet. How far away it is from working can be measured with a multimeter in line with the signal wire (in current mode). You can test (e.g. with a bench power supply, or with successively adding batteries) what minimum current is needed for the electromagnet to work. Adding voltage helps, but only linearly, so if you have x times too little current, you would need x times more voltage (which quickly becomes impractical).
It was nice having the museum guy talk, I got lost a bit later on when it was just your narration, some graphics would nice and help the production quality. I might be miss remembering but did you ever do some basic stop motion in previous videos for an explanation?
That's insane! You should have called the local ham radio club, and had some elmers come out and do the morse code though, It would have been under 5 seconds for them.
It didn't make it in the video, but indeed we did anneal the wire. We found that with copper, annealing after every two to three passes through the die seemed to work well.
A type of "sounder" with another set of key contacts built-in is the simplest way to re-amplify and relay a telegraph signal... thus the modern device, the electromechanical relay.
As an electrical engineer, earth return probably wouldn't ever work with your setup, you would likely need a much longer earth rod and a higher battery voltage for it to work. Even with that you would probably need a better optimized sounder to be able to receive the signal. Either way this is an awesome accomplishment.
I know you will find references of SWER referred to as telegraph it literally only works at high voltage with a stup down transformer for the receiver. It is not in common une in Electrical installations but some do exist where previously it was the best technical.solution for some installations. In Australia if you have a look around in the outback (or ask) you might be able to look at parts of some they are most often on private property. Good work.
the ground return system works better if the ground rods are deeper and further apart, because ground currents are analogous to many parallel conductors. I have done earth conductivity tests for transmission systems and large scale industrial projects that require cathodic protection for underground steel structures, and would suggest 15 foot rods placed a quarter mile apart as a minimum for a 24V ground return with a resistance less than 3 Ohms in sand/loam/clay soils. I have had results of less than 50 milliohms in 100 m of depleted tarsand based soil, which makes sense because bitumen is pretty much a semi conductor and the other ingredients are mafic sands
I think an interesting collab idea that could branch from this for opensauce if you guys had more time was to seek someone to do an interpreter for it using current tech. A device that could “listen and record” the message received from the wire and note it down much how telegraph houses used to do. But instead of taking the direct output from the receiver (because probably the battery you guys had wouldn’t be able to handle it), having something that could listen and interpret the signals to 1s and 0s and display it on a screen on the other end would make a nice show piece of 1900s meets 2024.
Ground Loop circuits operates in the 10-50 kilovolt range and requires AC current. In order to get DC to work, I suspect the grounding rod would have to extend down to the water table, but that's just my guess.
Jules Verne described the sending signatures via the telegraph in the novel Propeller Island, also known as Floating Island. In the book, the rich inhabitants of the island ordered goods from the islands stores using the telegraph and also signed for them via the telegraph. The idea was based on a real invention for sending handwriting via the telegraph, but it wasn't compatible with morse code. So it was never adopted.
That we did! I think you can see in part of the video I have some oil cloth that I'm running the wire though just before it gets pulled through the die.
After this you must make a Telephone then a Crystal Radio. And after that, you must make pedal powered radio i.e. Bush Radio. Bush Radios used to be the major telecommunication method in Rural Australia.
I think ground return should work a lot better using AC current. Using batteries provides DC wich has to complete a full round before the signal is usable. But the "hot" line of an AC signal works as long as there is a ground path. That being said either way actual dirt has a pretty high resistance.
I was wondering if you are quenching your copper wire while you are pulling it? Copper work hardens and unlike steel when you quench it, it gets softer. If you are not heating it up and quickly cooling it down, that may be the reason it keeps breaking. I know that it will add another dynamic/complexity in making the wire and you risk burning the wire.
I'm an electrician by trade, I'm pretty sure you need an alternating current power source to get the earth return to work. The direct current batteries produce doesn't really "go to ground" the way AC power does.
Thank you so much for the video, this is a great illustration of what the world was like then, the difficulties that we have should move us further in understanding the structure of this world, however, this should lead us to something more significant than wars and disputes, people will wake up we have one planet... Before it's too late. May God strengthen and bless you, and good luck watching the channel.
As a long time follower and admirer of your work, I'm struck by how much nicer and more professional your final products are these days. This is an incredible project and leap in technology
Same
I'm actually struck by the opposite, how he 'unlocks' technologies to jump centuries ahead without having mastered a damn thing.
@@puremilkgenius To be fair, mastery takes decades to achieve and a TH-cam series just doesn't have a time for that. No one's going to watch you make clay pots over and over again.
@@puremilkgeniusI’m not a fan of how he doesn’t refine the things he builds, the “saw mill” is a great example of what looks like cobbled together pieces of wood doing a crappy job lol
@@Davedave000he could at least refine the things he makes
As an electrical engineer I’m overjoyed that you’ve gotten to this stage.
On the same vein of early communication, with the amount of copper wire you have available it’s well within the realm of you making your first crystal radio receiver and /or crude spark gap transmitter. The future is exciting and I can’t wait to see how this branch of HTME progresses!
for crystal radio they need a diode though which requires chemicals they likely don't have. Also with such crude technology it would be hard to sync the frequencys.
Among the first semiconductors circuits were galena “cat’s whisker” diodes that just used a very thin piece of wire to find and use a crystalline rectification junction to demodulate an AM radio signal. This was first done in the late 19th century. I agree, an AM radio receiver would be rad.
Although… if we are talking about building a wireless telegraph as a next step you don’t need a semiconductor. Marconi just used a “spark gap” and an antenna as the transmitter and early receivers (like magnetic detectors) weren’t that much more sophisticated
@@A_youtube_channel_ just like the reply above,a detector diode can be made very easily with crystals found in nature already from Galena to Iron/Copper pyrites. The hardest part is getting enough wire for a coil and potentially making an earpiece from scratch- that would be the hardest given to crystal radios you’d need a high impedance load sensitive enough for the weak signal.
Should we remind them that Spark gap radio cannot be operated legally now.
@@陳冠維-f7i I’m sure that for educational purposes and limited power this won’t be an issue as much as people making their own transmitters for science fairs etc… we’re not talking kilowatts of power or extended periods of transmission. For the purposes of a video it should be fine. I’m no legal expert but for all intents and purposes a primitive transmitter one can assume would be built would surely put out less interference than some switch mode power supplies or whatnot.
i like how you guys jump back and forth from sawmills to chemistry and telegraph lines, really keeps the series fresh!
Man I love it when you bust out the treadwheel for some good old fashioned pullin'
As a Ham radio operator, I can say that Morse Code (CW for Carrier Wave) is alive and well. It's a great deal of fun, and when you become proficient, you can "hear" words. At speed, it's musical, and you can definitely hear the rhythm of another operator and recognize their fist.
that's so fascinating and entertaining!! i love music so much and I've always thought it would be fun to learn morse code. i also think those HAM radios are cool, so maybe i could try those as a good medium to learn morse code on/for!
That is super cool.
CW =[ Continuous Wave not carrier wave.
@@danquigg8311 It's both, but I hope correcting me made you feel better about something.
Continuous wave !!!
I’ve been reading about WWII Morse code operators, and how they could recognise the “fist” of a Morse code operator using the radio by the way they pressed the key. Like recognising someone’s handwriting, but they called it an operator’s fist.
They even allegedly used concert pianists for “funkenspiel” or radio games, where things would happen like using specially trained concert pianists to replicate an enemy radio operator’s fist to insert counterfeit messages using broken cryptography for intelligence and counter intelligence purposes.
Radio Morse code is obviously a different t beast - but people would tap communications lines to introduce a sounder and relay so they could listen to messages, or insert their own. It was an unbelievably wild time to be alive and the real dawn of the nerd.
My hometown was the site of the first transatlantic cable. There’s still a piece of the old cable sticking out of the ground.
You can extract it and keep it as a souvenir, it will surely be worth a few thousand dollars in the future.
I worked on the last transatlantic cable. It was fiberoptic though, and is also abandoned.
As I understand it, the US rail lines had the batteries at the receiver end. This way, just a key to ground could send a message. The trains carried a key with them. If something went wrong between stations, with just a key, you could climb a pole and send a message.
I believe they used a fairly high voltage. I also think that the system was likely a "positive ground" system.
The had some method of heat treating wire to keep it soft as they went smaller and smaller.
Wire was often wrapped with thread. Unlike the goo insulation you were using, cotton would hold up under pressure.
On the sounder, the clearances were very small to take advantage of the fact that the force created by an electromagnet are greatest just before the armature hits the pole piece.
yeah, they could definitely use an annealing treatment to recover the metal's ductility after every 2 or 3 passes of the wire. that would make it require less energy to deform as well
Further refinement of the receiver/sounder: attach a pencil lead to it and pass a strip of paper moving at constant speed under it, this way you get a printout of the message without someone having to manually write down the dots and lines
If this channel teaches me anything, it's that there is good reason why so many trades have long held traditions. Nothing came easy and each skill took generations to master,
8:55 Were you all remembering to anneal between each draw through the die? That you can maybe add a couple of grooved wheels to keep the copper where it is pulled through the die perfectly perpendicularly or as close to it as you can manage.
yes we were annealing it, the reason it looked like it was twisted up was so we could give it an even heat.
I've seen this being said quite a few times now, why keeping it perpendicular would help? Is it to lessen stress on the material as much as possible?
@@Fyr365 Well when the material comes through the hole if you don't pull it directly perpendicular, the stress will be focused to one side of the wire and can cause more stress in a smaller space making it easier to snap. If you pull it perpendicular the whole wire takes the force equally around its circumference.
@@schoktra Ah I see now! It makes so much sense. Thanks for the reply! 😊
Follow up on the annealing question, did you use anything to reduce friction like a beeswax rub on the plate?
I've seen a few of your episodes and was very impressed. Building a sawmill, making a tee shirt, forging out tools, making a battery, making corn flakes and now making a telegraph. I hope for an up coming, you make the first light bulb. That would be a nice one. Keep up the good work 👍👍👍
Been watching since the sandwich trailer. I'd like to say, after the unfortunate situations that occurred during your time on TH-cam, you have drastically refined your skill. It's almost like not having access to the tools you used to have has increased your skills for the greater good. You have progressed immensely!!
Lard on the wire as lubricant before pulling. Heat wire red hot occasionally to reduce copper hardness. Makes for less breaking and easier pulling.
Stone tools to digital communication in four years. That is very impressive.
Technically it isn't digital, since there's not any transistor technology involved. It works on analog! But telecommunications from scratch is still amazing!
@@plvmbvm513 It uses a binary code. The circuit is either open or closed. That sounds digital to me.
@@plvmbvm513 It's digital, as there are only two states used to transmit information (On or off). Analog systems have a range of states.
@@Theinatoriinator This debate has raged for decades in amateur radio spaces. The US FCC, though, doesn't classify CW/Morse code as a digital communications mode, however. The reasoning I've heard goes that it's not operating on on/off signals only, as the duration and spacing of the pulses is also necessary to carry useful information. Something like Baudot code used for 2-FSK is where it becomes more "digital" (it's very similar to modern ASCII)
@@Theinatoriinator Morse code is more about length of pulse and not off and on
Historical note: There are TWO Morse codes. One is American Morse ( Which my father learned as a young child , before radio, used by railroads and land telegraphs that used the sounders like they have made here; where the spacing of the "dots & dashes" was critical.), and the one in use today, International Morse which uses tones generated by the transmitters through the air.
I have an very old Instructograph Machine with tapes for American Morse.
That you made 20awg is pretty impressive; early telegraph lines were multiple (sometimes up to a dozen) strands of 16ga, to reduce voltage drop, so you may have had more luck with a thicker wire. That's especially important with an earth return system, since half of the path is going to be even worse than the wire. A quarter mile of #20, passing 20V to power, say, a quarter amp coil, loses almost half the power to the wire alone; make half the circuit just a little bit worse and you're running out of voltage pretty quick.
Keep in mind that you are running against extreme novice telegraph operators who are writing down dots and dits and decoding them after. Expert morse operators today can get up past 50wpm without writing down anything, though 25wpm is a pretty good cutoff for skilled or not as at that point you can't decode individual letters on-the-fly and instead are recognizing whole words. You'd have to be a pretty fast runner to outrun your five-word (Paris standard word) phrase...
I think these are really good points. When we calculated the resistance of our wire, we figured, in ideal conditions, it had around 14 ohms of resistance for the quarter mile, each direction. It didn't really sound like much, but ohms law is our enemy here.
man oh man a telegraph that can send a message to a cell phone then be converted to text now thats the most
unique and creative way ive ever heard of to show off old tech in such way that young people will be interested in for more than a few seconds andy you deserve to recognized for what your doing your a hero young man
Earth return you need to soak the ground at the electrodes with saline solution, quite a lot of it, to get the resistance down, plus leave time for the saline solution to soak deep down. Probably easiest if you use a pipe auger to make the hole, fill with salted ground, and put the electrode in it, though the grass on top will not recover for a long time.
Plus you also need a good few electrodes in parallel each end, to get maximum surface contact between the rods and the ground, with the rods no closer than their length apart as well.
it's also dependent on the geology of the area. And good luck trying it on the moon.
Plus their rods should be a lot deeper, most houses have 8ft rods for grounding and they may not even carry the low amount of power he's working at.
I suspect they used multiple rods. Most of the resistance is in the first few inches from the rod.
dry conditions, too low amps or voltage, poor wiring connections, many many variables. We fight with elc fence regularly that's not two wire systems due to poor earth grounds. +/ - wire systems is the only way to go, until a tree falls on it anyways.
@maxr1401 believe me, In Minnesota dry conditions are not an issue this summer. We're dealing with flooding now
I think the ground-return path is area-based, from what I know, telegraph stations used to bury huge squares of metal to achieve ground return, so maybe that's it
It's also the lack of a relay acting as a weak signal amplifier. Telegraph stations could receive extremely weak signals, measured as voltage potential, and boost them high enough to operate the noise-maker at the other end, but without that you need a ton of voltage to arrive at the end and 20v minus voltage loss over that thin wire just isn't going to cut it.
@@oasntet This is what I thought when they assembled all the wiring, an intermediate relay as an amplifier would have solved the problem of the lack of power in the signal.
I am impressed with how much patience you guys have. With that many turns on the electromagnet I would have already wanted to take a drill out
I remember learning with cups and string in school between doors lol. Always amazed me.
The thumbnail I got in my notifications was so small that it looked like a mouse trap. I'm going to assume it's not a mouse trap.
I thought it was Gustav the railway cannon 🤣
Your key and sounder are works of art in brass. Love it!
Thank you so much!
Thanks for the upload; it's always good to keep track of our roots. In 1998, a former colleague was retiring from US State Dept Communications; his subordinates disliked him because he had difficulty keeping up with Comms technology as the world was transiting from analog to digital (cellular). For his retirement ceremony, as a "gag" gift, they presented him with a Morse key mounted onto a plaque, thanking him for his service. He got excited, teared-up right away, and exclaimed "this is what we used when I began my career with the government..." He had started out as an Army "ditty-bopper" during the Korean War. Fast forward to just last year (2023), I met a young man discharging from the Navy, I asked his MOS...he was a ditty -bopper. Seriously..? Yep, the Navy had re-introduced Morse Code intercept.
I agree that this was one of the biggest steps of technology. This is as big as bronze age vs stone. There was communication before telgraphs (by hand) and after (by speed of light).
please continue with this video style. it was very engaging and easy to follow with the structure that you applied to it!!
It's so weird that you uploaded this now. I became a radio amateur in 2018 in the UK and learnt morse in 2019. This weekend I picked up the ARRL's technician license book to re-learn and get a license to operate in the US. This is awesome stuff. Thanks for the video
Iam also a Ham , 73
I build antennas for a living and I can't wait to see your creations!
Stunning bringing together of techniques and technologies, asphalt, linseed oil, sounds like Japanning recipie. making an insulated coil put a tear in my eye, that was an achievement still used today. Super impressed by the whole build. You made a machine that can transport truth and lies.
Are you guys going to do a video on how your refined your zinc? You kinda glossed over it last time and I really want to know since that would be the biggest hurdle for me if I was a time traveler.
He shows the smelting technique in the Voltaic Pile video.
Absolutely incredible! The entire team's commitment to this series is astonishing! ❤
The Dutch comedian Herman Finkers had a bit about early telecommunications in his skit, two persons see smoke signals one says to the other what does that mean? the second person said I'll read it for you,... help!.. my... rug... is... on... fire!!...
Impressive! You guys hare really getting good at this! Seems like every video is a notch above the last lately. Good job!
One of the coolest Channel Concepts of all Time. Love everything about this Project and Thank you for keeping on going for such a long time.
I have a little experience working with grounding grids. The electrical testing done on grounding grids is called the Fall of Potential. For the grounding to be effective over long distances, multiple (4+) metal rods should be driven in 6-8 ft depth around the sending and receiving areas.
You should get the book called “How to rebuild Civilization” also known as “The Book”. It has a ton of information on things very similarly to what you’re doing. It’s got things like ancient battle tactics, herbalism, useful inventions, farming, etc. I think has around 400 pages of information.
This is amazing! I'm floored by how far you've come, and impressed how you've kept high standards consistently all these years. Here's wishing everyone at HTME many more!
I love this. Its soooo coool. I cant wait till he makes his own wifi
I passed by this video in my feed SO MANY TIMES because....honestly idgaf about a history of the telegraph. it took me a while to remember that this is "How To Make Everything" and then was like "holy jesus that's right this is about the FUN parts of things LET'S GOOOO pass the popcorn"
The Telegraph is an amazing step for mankind. I love learning anything and everything about it. Thank you!
If you make your key break instead of make the circuit you can put a key and sounder on both ends and send messages both ways on one wire.
Just for courtesy. Samuel Morse did not invent “Morse” Code as we know it. Morse wanted to use numerical values for words and had an entire book made to transmit specific code. Alfred Veil, Samuel’s business partner, ran with the idea of using the most common alphabet letters as simple dots and dashes along with using special characters.
It should be called Veil Code, which in my mind sounds cooler and gives credit where it is due.
this happened a lot back then; a number of inventors were either outright robbed of their ideas, or were convinced to sell the rights to someone who had the missing capital needed to get the idea off the ground.
@@tsalVlog still happens
@@zachmoyer1849 truth.
Morse stole all the credit that he could, but he was mostly just the money guy and not an engineer or someone with technical skills. From what I've heard of him he sounds like a terrible person in a lot of ways, so it would be nice if people stopped giving him credit that he doesn't deserve.
Vail, not Veil, but I agree. It is one of the reasons radio operators today don't bother calling it "morse", it's just "cw" for some complicated technical reasons.
Great video and project.
As a new amateur radio operator, I'm slightly disappointed that you didn't reach out and find some local hams who still do morse code over the air (CW) to operate and listen to your telegraph, they could have conveyed and decoded "what hath humanity wrought" a lot faster. Even 10wpm is considered slow by their standards, but would have been a lot faster. Hope to see this once you build a radio! (morse code over the air being the first use of radio)
Glad you were still able to string up and power a long enough wire to outrun the runner, wonderful work!
You and your team are skilled craftsmen.
Firstly it is amazing what you do here and the way you keep learning new things.
I saw that you didn’t re heat the copper wire between passages in the die. If you will reheat the wire to his recrystallization temperature it will brake less. Also there is graph that can Help you to plan your passages and when exactly you need to re crystallized the copper. If you will write in google “cold work copper” you will find the graph you need.
Good luck with your work hope to see more soon 👍
LOVE how good it looks
At Pipe Springs National Monument in AZ, there is a telegraph station setup, and some stretches of wire are still there. From what i saw, they used like 6 gauge solid steel wire. Low impedance is your friend.
Do you need to anneal the wire between pulls? In case I ever need to make my own wire.
Indeed! I believe it varies on the material you're working with, but we found with copper wire that annealing after every two to three passes was ideal to keep the copper from getting too brittle.
I think so because they seem to be getting breaks it looks to me like the copper is work hardening after a few pulls. I would at least have it warmed through a fire before being drawn. Also the angle. They pulling the wire up at an angle instead of straight through.
9:42.
HTME has always been a great, but Andy has always been messy. It has improved since the early days.
For copper, every 3 pulls is a good rule, as most available plates are meant to be used with the hands or a draw-bench. You can get away with 4 on silver and sterling, and for iron, it really depends on the alloy!
would it not also have less chance of breakage if you wind it onto a spool close to the draw plate instead of pulling an ever longer piece of wire.
Is there any way to anneal while pulling? Like, continuosly, instead of doing one step after another?
And is there a way to pull continuosly? Like, whitout the need to take the entire wire out, to start squishing the rest?
I remember that paper which contained how to make cellular networks... it wasn't easy to make it but it did make that village have their own sim cards and network
Super cool project! The race at the end was a fun way of demonstrating the technology!
The telegraph episode!!
Thanks for letting me play with this at open sauce! Getting to meet all of you there was great! It's impressive what you've been able to accomplish and i can't wait to see what you do next!
That's awesome! Glad you were able to stop by the table.
Andy's incoherent talking while he ran was very relatable
Make an oscillator from your relay and place it at the senders site. I think to do that you need to add a contact when the relay is open. Connect the normally open contact to the coil. Connect the other end of the contact and coil to the battery with the morse key/switch in between. This way you can create a audible sound. At the receiver you just need to add a simple speaker. I think AC travels far longer with being audible. But you can't amplify the signal with relays. Therefore to repeat the signal you can use a relay, but when the wire resistance is to high it won't work. Or you need to make your relay more sensitive. Make the moving part of the relay smaller and lighter so that the electromagnet has to move less mass. I just wanted to make suggestions how to improve this setup. Nice work.
As a ham that does CW (Morse code) regularly, I appreciate the effort put into this! Need two hams to man both sides. :)
Shame the ground return didn't work in the end, still amazing to see it working and your key + sounder look gorgeous
We made a telegraph for a school project when I was a kid. Miss my dad.
props for drawing your own wire!!! i was sarcastically thinking to myself, "what, is he gonna draw his own fire too???" before i got to 7:16 lol
Congratz on your hardwork! It's awesome to see you get this far and I can't wait to see what will you do in the future. Are you considering building a wireless version, with a spark transmitter? Ofc you wouldn't be able to test how long range it is due to modern laws, but a weaker signal to just test inside a room should be legal.
Personally, I'm really hoping we can give it a try!
Your problem was too low of a voltage and too high of a current, the ground has quite high resistance. Modern wire pulling uses geared rollers that very precisely exert force on a small part of the pulled wire and right after they anneal it so it doesn't become brittle on the next pull. That's how we can end up with such thin copper strands. Also adding some resistors in parallel with the both ends of the cable would terminate some of the undesired self induction of the transmission wire and sounder coil which will increase signal quality and speed up coil reaction time due to decreased electrical ringing in the system. By the way what this system did could probably be detected by radio receivers miles away because of all the sparking and inductive load with a big antenna you had. You should bring in a ham radio operator with a frequency analyser to check out what kind of a signal that contraption generated.
I am surprised that a hand cranked rolling mill was not used to form the wire. Graduated grooves in the iron rollers would compress the copper down to 18gauge then to a drawplate for finer wire. The rolling mill was common in the early 19th century at least.
railway telegraphs with the clicking variant of the code is very fascinating to me as a ham radio morse code operator. thanks for sharing this. I especially appreciate spark gap technologies of the 1910s era of communications. Maybe you could one day make the best video on one of those as well. 73
Earth return needs a lot of contact area to the earth and it works a lot better when everything is really wet. How far away it is from working can be measured with a multimeter in line with the signal wire (in current mode). You can test (e.g. with a bench power supply, or with successively adding batteries) what minimum current is needed for the electromagnet to work. Adding voltage helps, but only linearly, so if you have x times too little current, you would need x times more voltage (which quickly becomes impractical).
Amazing work lads, now we just need to figure out wirelees, and intra/internet
Still one of the best channels out there ;3 Great work!
I appreciate you and your team making such an informative and fun video! This was so cool!
It was nice having the museum guy talk, I got lost a bit later on when it was just your narration, some graphics would nice and help the production quality. I might be miss remembering but did you ever do some basic stop motion in previous videos for an explanation?
This is such a good video, reminds me of the ambition of the old ones.
That's insane!
You should have called the local ham radio club, and had some elmers come out and do the morse code though, It would have been under 5 seconds for them.
Did you try annealing the wire while you were drawing it out? It should help to mitigate the work hardening that causes breaks.
It didn't make it in the video, but indeed we did anneal the wire. We found that with copper, annealing after every two to three passes through the die seemed to work well.
A type of "sounder" with another set of key contacts built-in is the simplest way to re-amplify and relay a telegraph signal... thus the modern device, the electromechanical relay.
It might be easier to draw the copper with between spools, and you probably need to anneal it after a few pulls to make it softer so it won't break.
As an electrical engineer, earth return probably wouldn't ever work with your setup, you would likely need a much longer earth rod and a higher battery voltage for it to work. Even with that you would probably need a better optimized sounder to be able to receive the signal. Either way this is an awesome accomplishment.
I know you will find references of SWER referred to as telegraph it literally only works at high voltage with a stup down transformer for the receiver. It is not in common une in Electrical installations but some do exist where previously it was the best technical.solution for some installations. In Australia if you have a look around in the outback (or ask) you might be able to look at parts of some they are most often on private property. Good work.
Great video, didn’t think it was possible to communicate across the world without using internet/electricity. Great video as always.
telegraph is electric though
@@TheDimsml how are the beams generated?
the ground return system works better if the ground rods are deeper and further apart, because ground currents are analogous to many parallel conductors. I have done earth conductivity tests for transmission systems and large scale industrial projects that require cathodic protection for underground steel structures, and would suggest 15 foot rods placed a quarter mile apart as a minimum for a 24V ground return with a resistance less than 3 Ohms in sand/loam/clay soils. I have had results of less than 50 milliohms in 100 m of depleted tarsand based soil, which makes sense because bitumen is pretty much a semi conductor and the other ingredients are mafic sands
I think an interesting collab idea that could branch from this for opensauce if you guys had more time was to seek someone to do an interpreter for it using current tech. A device that could “listen and record” the message received from the wire and note it down much how telegraph houses used to do. But instead of taking the direct output from the receiver (because probably the battery you guys had wouldn’t be able to handle it), having something that could listen and interpret the signals to 1s and 0s and display it on a screen on the other end would make a nice show piece of 1900s meets 2024.
can't wait to see what you do for a telex machine.
Ground Loop circuits operates in the 10-50 kilovolt range and requires AC current.
In order to get DC to work, I suspect the grounding rod would have to extend down to the water table, but that's just my guess.
Jules Verne described the sending signatures via the telegraph in the novel Propeller Island, also known as Floating Island.
In the book, the rich inhabitants of the island ordered goods from the islands stores using the telegraph and also signed for them via the telegraph.
The idea was based on a real invention for sending handwriting via the telegraph, but it wasn't compatible with morse code. So it was never adopted.
FYI copper work hardens so you need to heat it up to soften it in between pulling
Did you guys lubricate your wire this time? That was a suggestion in the comments last time that people said helped.
That we did! I think you can see in part of the video I have some oil cloth that I'm running the wire though just before it gets pulled through the die.
They need to regularly anneal the wire too, that’s a very important part of things that I don’t believe they’re aware of
@@ayyydriannn7185 They did that last time so I'd imagine they did it this time too
After this you must make a Telephone then a Crystal Radio. And after that, you must make pedal powered radio i.e. Bush Radio. Bush Radios used to be the major telecommunication method in Rural Australia.
I think ground return should work a lot better using AC current. Using batteries provides DC wich has to complete a full round before the signal is usable. But the "hot" line of an AC signal works as long as there is a ground path. That being said either way actual dirt has a pretty high resistance.
this is the coolest channel ive ever seen
Thanks for dropping BH!
Well done, Andy and crew!
Awesome episode! Also, finished products looked dope. 🙌🏽
seeing imacs in their museum makes me feel some typa way :S those were my middle school days
I’ve been to the pavek museum. So much fun!
Now you only need to finish that camera to complete the side goals (or at least those that I'm aware of).
Hope I can go to open sauce next year. I love this channel.
I really like the look of that 6 wire setup.
That was cool seeing it done! Best of luck with that olive oil finish, gotta let us know if it gets rancid on you.
I was wondering if you are quenching your copper wire while you are pulling it? Copper work hardens and unlike steel when you quench it, it gets softer. If you are not heating it up and quickly cooling it down, that may be the reason it keeps breaking. I know that it will add another dynamic/complexity in making the wire and you risk burning the wire.
Next you sound try a phone system. Like the phone over fence wire that they used to use in rural areas
I'm an electrician by trade, I'm pretty sure you need an alternating current power source to get the earth return to work. The direct current batteries produce doesn't really "go to ground" the way AC power does.
Thank you so much for the video, this is a great illustration of what the world was like then, the difficulties that we have should move us further in understanding the structure of this world, however, this should lead us to something more significant than wars and disputes, people will wake up we have one planet... Before it's too late. May God strengthen and bless you, and good luck watching the channel.
I would also like to see your workshop, please give me a tour 👍
This is so close to relay switches that you could actually get to some basic computing soon!